Tag Archives: Beth El Congregation

Just a couple of weeks ago I had an experience that was both rare for me these days, and also I realized, refreshing, and perhaps even important in an odd way. I was out and about in the Baltimore area, and as happens about 99% of the time, I saw from across the room someone I know from the congregation. I figured I would go over to say hello and check in for a moment or two, knowing of course that the person would know I was there, and might feel slighted if I didn’t say ‘hi.’

I went over to the person and reached out my hand to shake hers, and said ‘how are you, good to see you.’ She looked at me with a blank stare, clearly in her mind thinking ‘who the heck is this?!’ Now I must admit my self esteem took a small hit. One of my own congregants, and she didn’t even recognize me!? How was this possible? After an awkward moment or two I said ‘its Rabbi Schwartz, from Beth El,’ at which point she realized who I was, and began to profusely apologize. I tried to reassure her – ‘please, no worries,’ I said. ‘Just wanted to say hello. Have a good time and I’ll see you in shul.’

Now in my poor congregant’s defense, I wasn’t exactly dressed in shul clothes. She is used to seeing me in a suit and tie, often with a tallis on, and that evening I was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, plus I had a baseball cap on my head. And it was probably in a place she was not expecting to see her rabbi. So I was totally out of context for her, and for a couple of days in my mind that was how I rationalized what happened.

But then I began to realize that the problem had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with me. That is to say, why should I have expected to be recognized in the first place? Am I so important, am I such a recognizable figure, that I think people should know who I am? What we had here was a problem of humility – namely my own lack of said quality. I had briefly forgotten one of my chief rules of rabbinical work, which is – never believe your own press clippings.

So it is perhaps propitious that we come to this week’s Torah portion, Tzav, in the week leading up to Passover, which as I expect you all know begins this coming Friday night. Because in both this morning’s Torah portion, and also in my experience of the Passover holiday, are lessons of humility that I will try my very best to take to heart in the months ahead. First of all, the Torah portion.

There is a wonderful story told of the Brisker Rav, who was the head of the Brisk Yeshiva in Jerusalem. It seems that he had a student who was having trouble getting along with his wife. One day the student arrived early at the Rav’s home. The Rav invited him in, poured him a cup of coffee, and asked him what was wrong. The student replied, ‘My wife is giving me a hard time because I refuse to take out the garbage. Can you imagine that she wants me, a Torah scholar, to actually take out the garbage.’ The Brisker Rav sagely nodded his head, and simply said to the student, ‘let me think about this.’

The very next morning -early – there was a knock on the student’s door. Much to his astonishment the Brisker Rav was standing at his doorstep asking to come in. When the student invited his teacher inside the Rav went straight to the kitchen, found the garbage can, and took it out to the street. When the student asked the Rav what he was doing he simply replied “It may be beneath your dignity to take out the garbage, but I thought I’d show you it isn’t beneath my dignity.” By the way what the student’s wife said to him was not recorded in the version of the story I saw. We can only imagine.

But the story does reflect a small and curious detail that our Torah portion relates about the Priests in ancient times, and their service at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Priests were the most important people in ancient Israel, honored and respected as religious authorities and sources of wisdom. And this morning’s portion describes their day to day duties in terms of their Temple service. One can imagine that the Priest arrived at work in the morning to great fanfare. After all, he was going to be doing God’s work for the people, offering the sacrifices, making judgements about which things were pure and which were impure, helping people to recover from illnesses.

But the very first thing the Priest had to do when he arrived in the morning was to take off his fancy clothes, put on his schlepper clothes – old jeans and torn sweatshirt – and then he had to clean out the altar area from the ashes of the previous day’s sacrifices, and then carry those ashes outside. So literally, the great Priests of ancient Israel started their days by taking out the garbage. And that image is a very helpful reminder to me about he importance of humility – even when, and maybe particularly when – you find yourself in a position of Jewish leadership.

Which brings me to the second thing that helps to reset my humility needle, and that is Pesah, precisely because it is the family holiday of our tradition par excellence. When I stand here and preach, or lead services, or help you with life cycle events, I am the rabbi, and always treated as such, with respect. And believe me it is very much appreciated. But when I sit down at the seder table with my family, even though I am leading the seder, I am not the rabbi. I am Tali, Josh, and Merav’s dad. I am Becky’s husband. I am my parents’s son, Becky’s parents’ son in law. My children remind me that I don’t know the proper tune to a number of the Passover songs. (which may simply be a comment on my singing) Becky quietly reminds me I am talking too much, and that we need to get the food out on the table, something my congregants would never do while I am conducting services. Becky’s parents remind me they knew me when. My parents remind me they REALLY knew me when. I think you get the picture, and as you may imagine, it is all very humbling, and it is wonderful. Sometimes it is good to be reminded that you are no more special, no wiser, no more insightful or wonderful, than anyone else.

Of course in today’s world that is a lesson probably everyone could benefit from. Certainly our politicians, so entrenched in their own views, so convinced of their own wisdom and that they know better than anyone else, could use a good does of humility. Maybe they should take a cue from the Priests in the Torah, and show up early to work, change out of their suits, put on their work clothes, and spend a half hour taking out the garbage. Lord knows there is enough of it in Washington DC. But I am guessing the list could go on and on, and we could all think of someone we know – whether ourselves, or someone else – who could use a good dose of humility.

The question, of course, is where does that dose come from? For me, the two best sources are my faith and my family. My faith reminds me of how grateful I should be for every day and every blessing, of how little I should take credit for and how lucky I am. My family reminds me of something even more important – who I truly am – which is, just a person like everyone else.

The young man stood with his grandmother as she recited the words of the Mourner’s Kaddish. It was her husband’s yartzeit, the anniversary of the date of his death. Tradition had called her back to the synagogue, had asked her to sit through a service in which God’s name was praised, to bend and bow, to speak the old and often arcane words of prayer. And now, after her husband’s name was read, tradition called on her to rise and say the ancient words which marked this day and her loss.

He had been gone many years. The grandson, now in his twenties, barely remembered his grandfather. He knew his name, of course. Had heard stories, oft told by family members. “Do you remember the time when…? Ah, that was Joe, that was Joe.” He knew what kind of work his grandfather had done, how much he meant to his family, even what the substance of his personality was. But he could not remember his voice, or the feel of his rough hands, or the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes when he smiled and laughed. Still the grandson stood, feeling a sense of familial responsibility in his heart, and also a deep respect and love for his grandmother. Not to be underestimated, the latter. So the young man also said the words – Yitgadal, v’yitkadash..

And what odd words they are! The prayer for grief and loss and heart rending sadness is simply a litany of praise for God. Death is never mentioned. Grief is never acknowledged. Sadness and loss and anger are so strangely ignored in these ‘kaddish-words.’ But of course the prayer is now more than the words. The words and letters have flown off the pages of ancient prayer books, and then somehow returned to their very place, letters in the same order, words on their proper lines, and yet the meaning, the feeling of them, has changed. They are not what they are, but rather what they have come to be through long years of grief.

There is something intensely sacred about that moment. Not in any God related way, not in anything otherworldly or supernatural. But intensely humanly sacred. A quiet chapel and a late hour. A small group of Jews gathering from some sense of responsibility, creating by their presence the minyan. Darkness softly falling outside. A flickering candle. Twinkling stars glimpsed through a window in the distant sky. And a young man standing with his grandmother, intoning ancient words, linked by history, tradition, family, and faith. And love.

In the spring of 1968 Simon and Garfunkel released their fourth studio album, entitled ‘Bookends.’ It was mostly a nostalgia tinged tour through the America of an earlier time, looking back to the days when things were less complicated, when our values and ideals held true, when we felt we knew who we were and what our purpose was. The album, with songs like America and At the Zoo, was on the one hand a pining for those times and feelings, but it was on the other hand a reckoning with what had come to be. Hence the record’s title: Bookends. A framing structure, both a beginning and an end, a looking back to the past and a vision of the future that together framed a coming to terms with the present.

Selichot eve is one of the bookends of the High Holy Day season. The Torahs, dressed in their yom tov white, are solemnly processed into the sanctuary, carefully placed in the ark. The service itself recalls the penitential liturgy of Yom Kippur, our appeal to the God of mercy to forgive us our sins, to accept with grace our imperfections. And perhaps more than anything else the melodies of the evening remind us that another year has come and gone, and that our faith once again calls on us to reflect on the nature of our lives. That process of intense reflection will end with the sounding of the shofar after the Ne’ilah service on Yom Kippur, another bookend. But it begins tonight as we gather together in this sacred space.

And we are blessed tonight, as community, to dedicate this space again – as we say during these sacred days, as we say in tonight’s service, חדש ימינו כקדם – renew our days as of old. May we look forward to a year that is filled with meaning, with family and friends, with light and life, with happiness and health.

The weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward published an op ed piece this week written by a rabbi named Jay Michaelson. The headline of the article is ‘Why You Shouldn’t – should not – Go to Synagogue on Rosh HaShanah this Year,” and Rabbi Michaelson spends some 1500 words or so explaining why he thinks it is a bad idea for Jews to come to shul to celebrate the beginning of the New Year. And I understand that some folks just like to be provocative, because that will get them a lot of hits on the internet, and I also understand that sometimes you have a deadline looming, and your are running out of time, and you end up writing the first thing that comes into your mind without fully thinking it through. So I am not sure whether the Rabbi is in the former category, the latter category, of whether he really believes everything he wrote. But he does raise three particular points in the article that give him pause, and he says should give us pause, in terms of attending services on the High Holy Days. And I would like to spend a few minutes with you this morning thinking about each of those points.

Interestingly (at least to me!) his first complaint is a theological one. We should probably establish a fundamental sense of what theology is – what is it? Essentially, the way you understand and think about God. And Rabbi Michaelson says that you shouldn’t come to shul on Rosh HaShanah because when you get there and open your Mahzor you are going to find theological concepts that will make you uncomfortable and that you may not believe. And as proof of this he cites, also interesting to me, probably the most beloved prayer in the entire Mahzor, the Unetane Tokef prayer. That is the one where we imagine God with a book that holds a record of our deeds from the year gone by, and where we say, ‘who will live and who will die, who by fire, who by water.’

Now I know that the theological implications of that prayer are problematic, and I myself don’t literally believe that God sits with a book and is writing names into it ‘who is going to live and who is going to die.’ But I also know that the prayer has a power and meaning that still speaks to people today. It may be because they’ve been reading it since they were little, and it brings to mind sweet memories of Rosh Hashanas gone by. It may be because the image itself, whether you believe it or not, can get you to think about your own deeds, which is one of the things people do find meaningful at the start of a new year. It may also be that there is a core truth to the prayer that Rabbi Michaelson either forgot or never understood, and that is in the course of any given year members of our community will pass away, and we truly don’t know what a year will hold.

But I think in general by couching his first objection to shul on Rosh HaShanah in theological terms Rabbi Michaelson misses the point entirely. Because theology is an intellectual exercise. It is a rational, philosophical approach to trying to understand God and our relationship with God. And I don’t think that is why Jews come to shul on Rosh HaShanah. I am a rabbi, and I can tell you I don’t wake up Rosh HaShanah morning and say ‘boy I can’t wait to do some theology today!’ For most of us the holidays are not about intellectually unpacking something. They are instead about emotion, about feeling something, that can’t and probably even shouldn’t be quantified by an intellectual process. So Rabbi Michelson’s first wrong turn is to assume the biggest problem with shul on Rosh HaShanah is an intellectual one, while the truth is most Jews engage in the experience emotionally.

The Rabbi’s second objection to Rosh HaShanah is that the holiday itself sends a series of mixed messages. He says it is about ‘celebration and seriousness,’ ‘rejoicing and repentance,’ and he sees those ideas as diametrically opposed, concepts that shouldn’t be combined into a single holiday, or ritual. But Judaism does that with virtually every holiday. On Passover the matzah is the bread of affliction, and the bread of freedom. On Sukkoth we rejoice in life and the bountiful harvest, but we also acknowledge life’s temporal quality with the fragile sukkah and the decaying branches of the lulav. On Shavuot we celebrate the giving of the Torah but we also recall that the Torah has been both a guide and at times a heavy burden to bear and a draining responsibility. And there is a reasons that themes come together on the holidays to conflicts and sometimes contrast – and that is because it reflects the ebb and flow of life. There are few perfect days, and even fewer perfect lives. The truth is most of life is a mixed bag, a combination of celebrations and sadnesses, of triumphs and tragedies, of the good and the bad. And the holidays, with their interplay of themes, acknowledge life’s complexity, and create sacred spaces in time that are recognizable to us and reflect our own lives.

And by the way, sometimes it is only from contrast that the power of an idea becomes apparent. Would the sense of freedom, and the gratitude that we feel for it on Pesah feel as powerful it we didn’t see it through the lens of slavery? On Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur would the focus on life and the celebration of a new year be as meaningful if we didn’t also find in the Mahzor images of life’s fragility? It is precisely the contrast that makes it all work, that makes it come alive. The only way you appreciate a sunrise is to have seen a sun set and to have lived through a night.

The Rabbi’s final objection to shul on the High Holy Days is that the services have become some kind of show, where the audience sits passively and watches as the rabbis and cantors perform some kind of ancient and arcane ritual, intoning words that have no meaning and that no one understands. And I do believe that he may at least have a point here, because it is a danger of modern Jewish life that sometimes the service can turn into a show.

But I don’t think he has even been to High Holy Days services here at Beth El. I don’t think he has been here in this sanctuary on Rosh HaShanah eve when a thousand Jews stand together, chasing in full voice the words of the Shema Yisrael. He certainly has not been here on the second day of Rosh HaShanah when for the 5th aliyah the entire congregation stands together to chant the Torah blessings. And there is no way he has been here during Ne’ilah, when the ark opens, and hundreds and hundreds of people stream forward to spend a few precious seconds in front of the Torahs on the holiest day of our year, to offer their personal prayers of gratitude and hope.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that shul is for everyone. I know it is not. But in a Jewish community of growing complexity, where people identity Jewishly in ways that they never have before, surely there is still plenty of space for the synagogue, for the particular and powerful community that can grow within walls like these, for the unique and sacred experience of continuing a three thousand year old tradition. The great prophet Isaiah, in the text of this morning’s haftara, reminds us that the Jewish tent may grow large – הרחיבי מקום אהלך – “Enlarge the size of your tent, extend the size of your dwelling, lengthen the ropes, drive the pegs firm!”

The Jewish tent grows larger and larger, but the synagogue is still at its center, an institution that conveys identity and transmits tradition like no other in the Jewish world –

may our shuls be full this Rosh HaShanah – and for many, many new years to come –

I would like to ask you to think with me for a moment about one of the most beloved scenes in the history of musicals, in the most beloved Jewish musical of all time. The musical itself? It must be Fiddler on the Roof. And the scene? So many great ones, but arguably the greatest of the great is the conversation that Tevya the milk man has with God just before he begins to sing ‘If I Were a Rich Man.” In that dialogue an exhausted and almost defeated Tevya walks his horse back to the family home at the end of what we would call in today’s parlance a ‘bad day.’ The horse has gone lame, and Tevya begins to talk to God. He complains a bit – kvetching would be the technical term. “Dear God – was that necessary? It is enough you pick on me. What have you got against my horse? Sometimes I think when things are too quiet up there, you say to yourself lets see, what kind of mischief can I play on my friend Tevya? I am not really complaining – with your help, God, I am starving to death. So what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune. If I were a rich man”…and you know the rest.

Of course Tevya in this scene, and perhaps throughout the entire musical, is at least on one level a metaphor for the Jewish people. Downtrodden, exhausted, in dire straights, facing a series of seemingly unending challenges, persecuted by the Cossacks – that is Tevya’s story – and that is also the story of the Jews. And Tevya has other qualities that also represent the Jewish people – he has a Jewish sense of humor, a strength of will and determination, a dedication to family, and despite Tevya’s ongoing misgivings about God, he has a kind of unbreakable faith in God’s goodness and God’s presence. In a sense God is Tevya’s constant companion in Fiddler. Despite his hardships, his troubles and tzuris – Tevya remains a believer.

You may remember that last summer there was a a new book by Harper Lee published. It was hard to miss it – it was covered by every major news agency, talked about on TV and radio, blogged about on the internet. Anyone remember the name of the book? Go Set a Watchman. There was so much fanfare about it because Lee had published only one other book in her life – which is? To Kill a Mockingbird. In the end it turned out that Go Set a Watchman wasn’t actually a new book. Instead it was a first draft of what would later become the masterpiece that we are all know so well. What really caught people’s attention about the new book was that it told an alternate story. Scout – the young protagonist in Mockingbird – is an adult in Go Set a Watchman. She lives in New York, not in a small southern town. But most significantly, the beloved character Atticus Finch, so memorably played in the movie version by Gregory Peck, who in To Kill a Mockingbird is a courageous champion of civil rights, is portrayed in the new book as a bitter racist.

This made people crazy. You were taking a beloved story, beloved characters, and changing them – and not for the better. And probably even more difficult for people, you were taking a symbol – Atticus Finch, a character who stood for wisdom, goodness, fairness, and equality – and you were destroying it. The character was beloved. People felt they knew that character, felt a certain ownership of him. And the new book had in a way taken Atticus away from them.

I don’t want to take away your Tevya. And there is no new version of Fiddler that will begin playing on Broadway soon. But I would like to take a moment or two this morning to imagine an alternate version of the story. On the surface this Anatevka looks the same as the original. Poor Jews living in the shetyl, struggling to get by and to maintain their dignity and their way of life. But under the surface things are different. Because in our version of Fiddler the beloved character of Tevya has slowly, over the years, lost his faith in God. The hardships of life have worn him down. He realizes as hard has he has worked he has very little to show for it. He is disappointed in his children, and he can’t understand why God hasn’t rewarded him for living his life as a faithful Jew. So he decides to leave that life behind. He violates the Sabbath without a second thought. He doesn’t go to shul, doesn’t even worry about keeping kosher, doesn’t wear his tzitzit. Perhaps he shaves his beard, and does his best to blend in with the gentiles in the village.

He would have every right to do it, to leave behind his faith. After all, as we see in that famous dialogue with God I referred to a few minutes ago, God hasn’t done Tevya any favors. And Tevya knows it. He acknowledges it, he talks to God about it, reminds God of it. But God never responds. The truth is, it isn’t a dialogue with God that Tevya has. It is a monologue. He speaks, and whether God hears or doesn’t hear we don’t know. But we do know that God doesn’t answer.

But in the end the real Tevya – the one we know and love – doesn’t seem to care. His faith remains unwavering, despite the difficulties of his life, and it is precisely that sense of resilience and enduring faith that marks Tevya, that makes him who he is. That is why we love him, that is why the character has been one of the most enduring characters in all of theater. If you took that away from Tevya, if you changed his character, we wouldn’t go to see the show, we wouldn’t have his songs humming around in the backs of our minds, we wouldn’t all know his name.

In a sense it is the same way of the Jewish people. Tonight begins Tisha B’Av, the saddest and most difficult day of the Jewish year. It is a commemoration of the great tragedies of Jewish history, most prominently remembering the destruction of the two great Temples in ancient Jerusalem. On this day 1,946 years ago the second Temple was burned to the ground. The Jews that were still alive were exiled, sent to Babylonia, their lives torn apart, families destroyed, homes and livelihoods lost. They felt abandoned by God, they wondered whether the ancient covenant that existed between God and Israel, established so long ago by Moses, was still valid. If there was any point in Jewish history when the Jews might have turned their backs on God, might have walked away, might have permanently lost their faith, that was the moment. They would have had every right to leave their faith behind.

But they did not. Instead, they turned their eyes to the heavens and they called out to God. In a way that wonderful scene in Fiddler when Tevya turns his eyes to the sky and says ‘dear God, was that necessary?’ is a continuation of that moment. It is a rhetorical question, of course. It was not necessary. But it is also a statement – God, I don’t understand, but still I look for You, still I call out to You, still I wait for You. Despite what has happened I will not turn my back on You. Instead, as it says in the psalms, אשא עיני אל ההרים מאין יבוא עזרי – I will lift my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come? And the next line of the psalm – עזרי מעם ה׳ עשה שמים וארץ – my help comes from God, who has made the heavens and the earth.

Tisha B’Av is about that moment. Yes, it is a commemoration of the destruction of the Temples. But even more so it is a celebration – a celebration of Jewish faith and resilience, of the strength of the Jewish spirit and the unending Jewish search for God. I hope you’ll all join us tonight for Tisha B’Av services as we continue that search together.

When we think about ‘kashrut’ – the question of whether something is kosher or not kosher – the first thought that probably jumps into our minds is food. But in Judaism the idea of ‘kosher’ applies to other things as well, not only to food. Can anyone give another example? One is the Sefer Torah – a Torah that is usable – that we are permitted to read from – is actually called a kosher Torah. Which of course begs a question – what makes a Torah kosher or not kosher? With food we have a pretty strong sense of how that question is answered – certain foods are by definition not kosher – pork the most obvious example. And certain foods can’t be mixed – like dairy and meat. If they are mixed, the food is no longer kosher. But what about a Torah? What makes a Torah kosher, and what might make it not kosher?

Let us first think for a minute about what makes a Torah kosher. First of all, the materials used to make the Torah have stringent requirements. The ink that is used to write the letters must be made in a certain way, and it absolutely must be black – any other color and the Torah is not considered kosher. The parchment, called in Hebrew ‘klaf’ must come from a kosher animal, usually a cow or a goat, sometimes even a deer. the letters must be written using a special quill, usually one made from the feather of a kosher bird like a turkey. When sections are sewn together the thread is made from the sinew of a kosher animal. And if any of these things are not right – if the quill is not proper, or the parchment is not from a kosher animal, or even the thread, the Torah is not kosher, it is not usable.

But it isn’t only the materials that make the Torah kosher. It also has to do with how the letters themselves are written. No letter in the Torah can touch any other letter – if two letters are touching, the Torah is not kosher. Certain letters have to be written larger than other letters – the best example is verse 4 in Deuteronomy chapter 6, the Shema Israel line, where the ‘shin’ of Shema and the ‘daled’ of echad must be written larger than the other letters. At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion there is another example – the word Shalom appears in the third verse of this morning’s portion – how do you spell that word in Hebrew? Shim, lamed, mem, vav, mem-sofit. And how do you write a ‘vav’ in Hebrew? One straight down line. Believe me, there are a lot of ‘vavs’ in the Torah. And all of them have to be written with a straight, uninterrupted line – except this vav in our word Shalom from this week’s portion. It has to be written with an interruption in the line – a space – and if that space isn’t there, once again, the entire Torah is not kosher and may not be used. That gives you just a little bit of an idea of what makes a Torah kosher or not kosher.

What about applying the same idea to a human being? What makes a person kosher, or not kosher? It might sound strange in our ears to phrase it that way, again because we so commonly associate that idea with food – but there is a talmudic concept of the ‘adam kasher’ – the kosher person. In the Talmud this is a person who is deserving of the ultimate respect, so much so that the Talmud says when an ‘adam kasher’ – a kosher person – dies – everyone in community is obligated to make a tear in their clothing, something normally only immediate mourners do. And everyone in the community is responsible for mourning this person’s loss. That is the level of respect and love that an ‘adam kasher’ engenders in the course of his or her life.

Now it might seem to you like the High Holy Days are still very far away, after all we sit here at the end of July, and Rosh Hashanah isn’t until the beginning of October! But the truth is in our liturgical cycle we are already pointing towards the fall holidays. We read today the first in a series of 10 haftara texts that try to build up our spirits so that we can stand before God with clean hearts and souls at the beginning of the new year. 10 weeks from Sunday night is RH. I don’t know about you – I tend to be a bit of a procrastinator – but the time is set aside for us, and I think the reason we are given so much time is that sometimes it can actually take quite a while to figure out how to be a kosher person. It isn’t as black and white as the laws of what makes food kosher or not, or a Torah scroll kosher or not. And wouldn’t it be nice if the tradition gave us some guidance as we went through this process. What is it that makes a kosher person?

It is an old tradition during the summer months to spend some time studying Pirke Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers. Probably more than any other text in Judaism, Pirke Avot lays out for us the tradition’s idea of what makes a person kosher. It deals with ethics and morals, with how a person should act towards his or her fellow, with what kind of responsibility one has in terms of being part of a community. The material is fairly wide ranging, but there are a few themes that come up again and again, ideals that the rabbis of old clearly believed defined what a kosher person should be.

A number of the ideals are things you might expect. Be a kind and compassionate person. Treat others with respect and dignity. Live with a sense of God’s presence in your life. All important qualities of the kosher person. But there are three particular ideals that the text identifies, ideals that are at the core of being an ‘adam kasher’ – that might not normally come to our minds.

The first of them is humility. The text reminds us that we are no more important that any other person, and that when we begin to feel more important than others – something we all seem to do at one time or another – we have wandered onto the wrong path and need to find our way back.

The next quality of a kosher person is communal engagement and commitment, a sense of communal responsiblity. In today’s world we tend to emphasize the individual over the community and the individuals needs and rights over the community’s needs. But in Judaism it is exactly the opposite. When an individual’s need conflicts with a communal need, it is the community’s need that takes precedence. As Jews we have an obligation not only to be connected to Jewish community, but to make sure that because of our presence the community becomes a better place for all.

The last thing is to be a learning Jew, to constantly strive to grow through the study of Judaism, Jewish thought, Jewish life, Jewish text, Jewish history. Tradition understands that we nourish our bodies with food and drink, but that we must always make sure to nourish our souls and spirits, and one powerful way to do that is through the study of Torah – not only the scroll we take out of the ark, but Torah writ large, our ancient tradition with all of its wisdom.

So as we begin our slow but steady walk towards the High Holy Days, and begin to weigh in our minds who we are and who we want to be, we can perhaps keep in mind the wisdom our our sages and an ideal they at least believed we should all strive for – not necessarily to keep kosher, all though that wouldn’t be so bad – but to actually, in the way we live our lives and the quality of our own characters, to BE kosher –

This a text version of yesterday’s introduction to Yizkor (Shavuot 5776) –

Judaism has long understood that one essential component of coping with loss is community. From the very moment that a family loses a loved one community is there. Friends begin to gather at the home, to offer comfort, guidance, and help. The funeral is a communal moment structured to honor and remember the life of the person who has died. Shiva is a paradigmatic communal exercise – at least 10 people are required for each service held in the shiva home, the days of shiva are filled with visits by friends and family members, the mourners are guided from one conversation to the next, from one moment to the next, always surrounded by people who care about them.

And then there is the period of saying the kaddish, for some 30 days, for others who have lost a parent a full eleven months. The minyan is again required because the kaddish is only fully valid when said in the presence of community. The services, morning and night, bring the mourner out of the home, into the synagogue, into the service with its sense of communal life and connection. I have watched many times as mourners have connected with our minyan, making new friends, finding a sense of purpose and resolve, finding in the community a reason to get out of bed and begin a new day. People are waiting here for you, they call when you don’t come, they care, they understand where you are and how you feel, because they’ve been there and they’ve felt those things, and they somehow made it through. And they will tell you that the community helped them do it.

We saw this in Orlando yesterday, that terrible, unimaginable, unthinkable tragedy that we will long wrestle with as a nation. Immediately community came together. People set aside political divides and racial differences and religious perspectives, and came together as one, came together as community to support and console the families of the victims and also one another. There was a powerful sense of fundamental humanity – it didn’t matter if people were black or white, gay or straight, young or old, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, conservative or liberal. There is a powerful picture on the front page of the Sun this morning, a black clergyman embracing a white man and a white woman, the three of them weeping together.

In community there is hope. In community there is healing. In community there is a sharing of difficult burdens, a sense that one does not have to walk alone on a path of sadness and loss, and perhaps sometimes even despair. Not that there is a magic formula, not that there is a secret ritual that will wipe the grief away. But there are people who will share the journey with you, and you are not alone.

The people in Orlando are not alone. They are surrounded by the thoughts and prayers of an entire nation, 300 million strong, a nation that believes in equality, in peace and freedom, and in the common human dignity that unites us all. In the months ahead they will come to see how this powerful sense of communal caring and sharing helped to ease the burden of their grief. They will gradually rediscover how beautiful it is when the wind blows gently through the leaves of a tree on a warm summer day. They will one day realize that they have begun to laugh again, to sometimes feel joy, to emerge from the darkness and the shadows to go back out into the world with purpose and courage and hope. This is the journey from loss to life, from sadness to meaning, from darkness to light, and it is a life long journey.

In Judaism part of that journey is Yizkor. A stopping point along the way that brings you back to community, to tradition, to the shul, to the minyan, that reminds you of the pain of loss but also, as time goes by, of the sacred power of life. As we rise together for this last Yizkor service of the year, as we prepare to say our personal Yizkor prayers, we also pray for hope and healing and peace, in our own hearts, in our lives, in our communities, and in the world.